


Saturday Night Skype

by xslytherclawx



Series: Cat Café Universe [8]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, Gen, Jewish Character, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Skype, references to soviet cinema
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-17 00:04:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11263815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xslytherclawx/pseuds/xslytherclawx
Summary: Yuri finds out something else he and Otabek have in common.(Set in early April 2017. Canon-compliant as of publication date).





	Saturday Night Skype

Yuri scratched Pyotya behind the ears as he waited for the Skype call to connect. He loved their Saturday night Skype calls, and even though he’d had to rush his packing a bit, he wouldn’t trade it for the world. Sure, he and Otabek texted each other throughout the day, every day, and they shared the _best_ cat videos with each other, and they called each other pretty frequently, but their Saturday night Skype calls were tradition, and Yuri wasn’t about to break that.

The call connected, and he saw Otabek sitting in his room, looking the same as he had the week before.

“Hey, Beka!” he called.

“Hey, Yura!” Beka looked behind Yuri. “Is your room actually _clean_?” he teased.

Yuri huffed. “I had to pack. Going to visit Ded.[1] I didn’t want my room to be a mess when I get back.” His room usually _was_ a mess, but it was much nicer to come home to a (relatively) clean room than to a messy one. Besides, Pyotya shed enough that vacuuming before he left would be a good idea.

“Oh, right,” said Beka. “Easter’s coming up.”

Yuri furrowed his brows. He supposed that Beka’s assumption wasn’t _totally_ off-base, but… “Not Easter,” Yuri said, scratching behind Pyotya’s eats again. “Passover. I always spend it with Ded.”

He couldn’t quite match the expression on Beka’s face. “Passover?”

Yuri nodded. “Yeah, it’s like, it celebrates when the Jews’ first-borns were passed over in ancient Egypt while all the Egyptians’ first-borns were killed, and the Jews were freed from slavery.”

“I know what Passover is,” Beka said, a smile on his face. Well, Yuri supposed that made sense.  After all, Muslims knew about the liberation in Egypt, right? That was a part of their religion, too, even if they didn’t celebrate Passover itself.[2]

“I mean, Ded and I always spend Passover together,” said Yuri. “It’s a family tradition.” Or as much of a tradition they had in their small family, anyway. Besides, Yuri usually missed his grandfather terribly, and Passover almost always fell in the off-season.

“My dad always leads our seder,”[3] Otabek said. “But how do you do a seder if it’s just the two of you?”

“Wait _your dad_ leads _your_ seder? _You_ do a seder?” Yuri asked, trying to process this information.

Otabek nodded. “Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not particularly… religious, and it wasn’t like I flew home to do seders while I lived abroad, but… when I’m home.”

“You’re _Jewish_?” That seemed like the only logical conclusion, right? But how had he not known?

Otabek nodded. “I thought you knew?”

Yuri felt his face heat up. “W-well, I just assumed… you’re from Kazakhstan… I thought you were probably a Muslim, or something. It didn’t matter to me.”

Otabek shook his head. “No; I’m Jewish. Always have been.” He shrugged. “Although I guess most people here are Muslim. And… I’m not any better. I assumed you were a Christian, or at least a non-Jewish atheist.” He had a guilty smile on his face.

Yuri laughed. “Then we’re both at fault. We should’ve talked about this sooner.” They could’ve done something, maybe. What, exactly, Yuri wasn’t sure, but the point was still there.

Otabek smiled. “So do you normally do Passover just with your grandfather?”

Yuri nodded. “I mean, we do a seder with his congregation, but we mostly just spend most nights together, just the two of us.” Which, really, Yuri preferred.

“That sounds nice,” Otabek said. “I’m the youngest in my family, so I always have to do the Four Questions.”

“Me, too,” said Yuri. He stretched. Pyotya climbed into his lap, and he scratched her cheeks.

“Hey,” said Otabek. “Uh, do you ever watch animated films?”

“Depends,” Yuri said. “I don’t like that Disney movie bullshit.” Although he _had_ loved _the Aristocats_ when he was young, although he wouldn’t admit it, not even to Otabek. Unless he asked directly, of course.

“You’re more of a _Hedgehog in the Fog_ kind of guy, huh?”  [4]

Yuri laughed. “Not necessarily.”

Otabek grinned. “You’d probably like _Le Chat du rabbin_. It’s a French animated film. The main character’s a rabbi’s cat who gains the power of speech tries to become b’nei mitzvah.”

“Okay, wait, important question, Beka. _Does the cat die_?” It was, after all, the most important question regarding any movie with an animal in it. If the animal didn’t survive, it was almost never worth watching.

Otabek shook his head. “No, he doesn’t. He eats a parrot, though. And there’s a blond Soviet Jew who punches a racist colonialist in the face.”

“Sounds like my kind of movie,” Yuri said, stretching.

“We should watch it sometime,” said Otabek. “If we can’t… be together in person, we could work a livestream, or something.”

That sounded great. “Yeah! Definitely! I’ll buy the DVD right now.” He switched over to his browser and ordered it.

“Actually,” said Otabek. “Maybe we could… visit each other? It’s the off-season. I’ve always wanted to meet your grandfather and Pyotya, too, of course. We could hang out and watch movies!” Otabek sounded almost shy about this, although Yuri couldn’t imagine why. They were best friends, after all, and Otabek was one of two people (three if you included Pyotya, which he usually did) who didn’t annoy Yuri to no end.

“Yeah!” Yuri enthused. “That would be great! We should totally do that!”

Otabek smiled. “Absolutely. Let’s plan it out.”

They spent the next hour planning out visits over the next few months – they really weren’t _that_ far from each other, in the grand scheme of things, and they both had the money to fly out to visit each other – and talking about their holiday traditions (both of their families had New Years’ Trees every year, although Yuri’s grandfather used an oil menorah for Chanukah and Otabek’s family used candles).

Yuri didn’t believe in fate or soulmates or anything stupid like that, but it definitely did make him think Otabek was even cooler knowing they had something else in common. And maybe it added to the ease of their friendship, that they shared this, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Yuri's last name seems to indicate that he's Jewish (he was likely named for Maya Plisetskaya who was a very famous Soviet Jewish ballerina); nothing like that exists for Otabek as far as I could tell, but I think it'd be a nice way to reinforce the fact that they're probably soulmates.  
> Yuri is absolutely clueless to the fact that Otabek is in love with him at this point; he just thinks they're best friends and clearly the only two people cool enough to deserve each other as best friends.  
> -  
> 1 "Ded" isn't a typo - it's a short form of Dedushka (grandfather) and is like "grandpa" - since Yuri and his grandfather are close, I figure he'd call him "Ded" most of the time, especially when talking to people who know him well (like Otabek) [return to text]  
> 2 Something like 70% of people in Kazakhstan are Muslim, so Yuri's assumption isn't totally off-base. [return to text]  
> 3 [About Passover and the seder, for those who don't know](http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-passover-pesach-seder/) [return to text]  
> 4 [About _Hedgehog in the Fog_.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_in_the_Fog) On [YouTube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW0jvJC2rvM) [return to text]  
> 


End file.
